Indian novelist Vikram Chandra was 12 years old when he wrote his first work of published fiction - a sci-fi story that appeared in the student magazine of his boarding school in India. "Until then, reading stories and telling them mainly to myself had been a reliable, profound pleasure and a desperately needed comfort," Chandra writes in , his fourth book and first work of nonfiction. "The shock of seeing my secret life made public, in print, thrilled my awkward, nerdy soul." As he wrote his way into adulthood, Chandra stumbled upon the world of computers as a postgraduate student in America. He taught himself enough computer programming to get lucrative part-time jobs, which led to his enduring interest in writing software, an aesthetic he compares in his latest book to painting as a fine art. Chandra, who teaches creative writing at the University of California in Berkeley, spoke with about how information technology is transforming our lives.
I really don't think of myself as a nonfiction writer. In fact, I have shied away from nonfiction. I have only written one other sustained piece of nonfiction, which was published first in [newspaper] and then in the in the late 1990s - an essay about the politics of writing in English in India. But you sometimes hit a point in writing fiction that's kind of a lull, a pause - your characters have reached a situation in which you don't quite know what's going to happen next. Generally, when that happens, I read a lot and watch movies and listen to music. And then, eventually, I'll find the solution to what's going to happen next. But this time I decided to focus on something I've been thinking about for years - computers and literary beauty. Because I had been reading literary theory, especially pre-modern Indian literary theory, I decided to write an essay - a kind of ethnography of programmers - for people who are not in IT. I thought of it as a glossy magazine kind of essay - 20 to 40 pages long. And I thought I would be done with it in a couple of weeks, which is how long it usually takes me to find an answer to whatever my fictional question is. But when I started writing, [the subject] just grew and grew. Three year later I realised I had a book.
It's true the space and time of our lives are much more permeable to outside influences. There are cameras everywhere and you have the sense that everything that happens in the world is instantly on your phone. In the early 1990s, when I got a letter I felt comfortable answering it within a week, even two weeks. And now … if you don't reply to an email within a couple of days you're being rude. We're caught up in the cycle of trying to keep up with all the communication, especially now that social media has become an instrument of social self-promotion.
